R (Pridmore & Ors) v Salisbury District Council & Anor [2004] EWHC 2511 (Admin)
The point in plain English: Ownership certificates and owner notices are not paperwork to be brushed aside. Serious non-compliance can make a planning decision unlawful and lead to the permission being quashed, especially where an affected owner has been deprived of the statutory process.
What happened
An application for a dwelling included land owned by neighbours, but the original ownership certificate wrongly stated that the applicant owned all the land. A later certificate purported to say that notice had been served on the neighbours, but the statutory timing requirements could not in fact have been met.
The council knew there were ownership problems but continued to process and determine the application, in part because the officer incorrectly believed the normal eight-week determination period had to be maintained.
What the High Court decided
Newman J held that the statutory ownership requirements were mandatory and that the application had been invalidly entertained. The resulting permission was voidable rather than automatically a nullity, so the court still had a discretion over relief.
On the facts the defects were serious, the statutory scheme had been undermined and potential prejudice had not been excluded. The planning permission was therefore quashed.
Why Pridmore matters
The detailed procedure has since changed, but the central lesson survives: get the ownership certificate and owner notification right before the application is determined.
See Planning Geek’s guide to ownership certificates on planning applications.
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